The present invention relates to the field of computer networks. More specifically, the present invention describes a method and a system for generating an operating system boot image for remotely booting a machine such as a computer.
Remote booting is a process for providing support to a target machine for loading an operating system boot image stored on a remote machine. The remote machine and the target machine communicate with each other using a communication link such as a local area network (LAN). Remote booting does not require the target machine to have a local operating system boot image. The operating system boot image stores hardware information such as the device drivers required for booting the target machine into the given operating system.
Usually, machines in the network differ in their hardware configurations. Therefore, the boot image present on the remote machine may not be able to boot the given target machine.
Various methods are currently used for configuring an operating system boot image for remotely booting a given target machine in the network. One such method is maintaining multiple versions of the boot image, properly configured to the specific hardware configurations of each target machine in the network. With the increase in the size of the network, the number of machines and the boot images required to boot these machines increases. As a result, managing multiple versions of the boot image leads to increase in consumption of resources and hence a large overhead.
Another method for configuring an operating system boot image is manually configuring the boot image during the process of remote booting. The manual configuration is based on the hardware configuration of the target machine and may include installing the drivers for the devices for which the boot image is not configured. However, this method requires manual intervention to configure the boot image. This makes it labor intensive and time consuming. Further, to avoid manual intervention, some methods execute a script on the target machine with the operating system boot image, which installs the drivers that exist on the machine. However, executing the script requires boot image to be loaded on the target machine. Therefore, the success of this method depends on the proper loading of the boot image. Further, only the device drivers that are available on the target machine can be installed.
Another method for configuring the boot image is recovering the pre-installed boot image of the target machine over the network and re-installing the image on the target machine. However, the method installs a fresh boot image on the target machine and looses the pre-configured states of the boot image.
In light of the above discussion, there is a need for a method and a system that automatically configures the operating system boot image to boot on different hardware platforms. The method should eliminate the need to maintain multiple versions of the boot image for different hardware platforms. Further, if an operating system is already installed on the target machine the method can recover the pre-configured states of the operating system.